Today: Judge Lucy Koh shoots down a settlement proposed by Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel that would have ended a class-action suit claiming collusion against Silicon Valley tech workers.

The Lead: Settlement in no-poaching case called too small, rejected

A proposed settlement of a class-action suit claiming some of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies had conspired against their employees was rejected Friday for being too low.

U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh shot down the $324.5 million settlement that Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel agreed to with lawyers for more than 64,000 valley tech workers, who claimed the firms agreed to not poach employees from each others' work forces. The valley employees who sued over the "no poaching" agreements were expected to demand at least $3 billion from a jury if the legal fight had moved to trial, an amount that could have tripled under federal antitrust law.

"The court concludes that the remaining defendants should, at a minimum, pay their fair share as compared to the settled defendants, who resolved their case with plaintiffs at a stage of the litigation where defendants had much more leverage," Koh wrote.

Koh also rejected the notion that evidence was stronger against the companies that settled earlier than those still at play.

"There is substantial and compelling evidence that Steve Jobs ... was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy," Koh later wrote.

Emails presented as evidence in the case showed these powerful executives sharing damaging remarks about suppressing recruitment between 2005 and 2009. In one such 2005 email exchange, Jobs reportedly warned Google co-founder Sergey Brin about recruiting Apple workers: "If you hire a single one of these people, that means war."

The proposed settlement has been called unjust by one of the four named plaintiffs in the 2011 lawsuit, Michael Devine, a former Adobe engineer who wrote a letter to Koh last April bitterly attacking the deal. He likened the settlement to a shoplifter stealing a $400 iPad from an Apple store and being able to resolve the theft by paying $40, keeping the iPad and not having to admit wrongdoing.

"There's no justice for the class in that, nor is there any real deterrent to future wrongdoing," wrote Devine. "We want a chance at achieving real justice."

Devine's opinion was not universal among the named defendants, however: Mark Fichtner, a former Intel engineer who now lives in Arizona, submitted a declaration calling the deal "fair, adequate and reasonable."

The companies previously settled an identical antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department, agreeing not to enter into such anti-competitive hiring arrangements. eBay settled a separate antitrust case with federal and state regulators.

On the flip side, SolarCity had the worst day in the SV150, falling 7.3 percent to $70.13 after revealing widening losses despite signing up more customers for its solar-power deals. Goldman Sachs analyst Brian Lee wasn't scared away by the report, though, increasing his price target from $92 to $96 and writing, "We came away incrementally more bullish on growth and value potential as SolarCity achieved a number of record operational metrics in the quarter." Zynga fought back from its lowest prices in more than a year, but still dropped 1.4 percent to $2.88 after missing projections with its earnings report and reducing projections for full-year performance. At least eight analysts hacked their price targets for the San Francisco company's stock, Reuters reported, as any possible Zynga recovery story seemed to move farther out on the horizon -- "It's now a 2015 story," Jefferies analyst Brian Pitz said.